What do you get when you cross first-class amenities with a blood-thirsty, third-world parasite? If you’re a downtown Seattle hotel you get bed bugs. According to several hotel sources and a couple of pest control experts, the bed bug is back in downtown Seattle, nobody wants to admit it, and they’re really expensive to get rid of. Pest control experts will readily tell you that as few as a couple of years ago bed......

When you're seen as the number-two city and number-two university in the state you can either embrace it or try and avoid the notion. Washington State University and Spokane had a chance to host next year's Vice-Presidential debate, and passed, deciding to hold out for one of the Presidential Debates, a gamble that didn't pay off. We're not sure if their loss is such a big deal. There's little mention of the location of a......

Seattlest likes parks. Especially the big ones with plenty of room for family picnics, Frisbee, flag football and lots and lots of gay sex. Seriously, Mr. Need-It-Now, can you not find another, less child-scarring place for business time? Seattle is home to a number of wonderful hotels. And what about camping? That's romantic, right? Okay, maybe it's not romance you're after. Maybe it's just fucking. That's cool. But why a public park? The outdoor thing?......

We recently asked friends and strangers if hosts of popular television shows “Devine Design”, “Flip This House” and “House Hunters” were real-life designers and real estate agents before network giants “discovered” them. We were starting to feel a moment of mental weakness on the subject when we, rather randomly, received a lovely note inviting us and you to see Than Merrill and Paul Esajian of A&E’s “Flip This House” during their real estate marketing tour.......

Once upon a time Seattlest considered North Aurora to be a shithole, to be avoided at all costs. But, eventually, we had to go to Home Depot and a used car lot, and that car rack store, and (doh) the unemployment office, and the movie theater, and IHOP and the European deli and Computer Stop and Chubby & Tubby (so far not Stupid Prices, though) and Kmart, Burgermaster, the cemetery and a hundred other tiny......

End of May, we posted about how the city sold the Alaska Building to a developer, with the understanding that it would be turned into affordable "workforce" housing. The city took a loss of somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million because of that stipulation, Mayor Nickels was able to gesture grandly at his affordable housing gesture, and then Kauri Investments Ltd. and Ariel Development got to thinking and they were all, "Hey, you know what......

Seattlest took a little trip to the Oregon coast recently. We experienced two opposing points of the coastal experience within several miles of each other. True to its name, the city of Seaside is the archetypal slutty seaside town replete with an arcade, candy stores, cheesy tourist shops, and snooty beach-fronting hotels that will be the first to go when the tsunami hits. One would think that this is the place one would find......

We got these "Complimentary VIP" tickets in the mail about a million years ago advertising some "wealth creation workshops" at various hotels around Seattle. We finally got around to calling them to see what the hell this was about and the phone answerer acted completely sketchy. We asked where the Income Strategies Institute is located and she said, "I can't answer that. All I can tell you is: somewhere in Utah." WTF!?? We asked......

The 90,000-square-foot seminary building at St. Edwards State Park is "one of Washington's unique treasures." But it hasn't been kept up since the 80s, and it's falling apart. Luckily, reports the P-I: McMenamins, a Portland-based chain of hotels, restaurants and brew pubs, submitted a 2005 letter of intent to lease the seminary building and turn it into a hotel with a restaurant and a conference center. Brian McMenamin, co-owner of the company that made the......

--Seattle: slightly less drug use than San Francisco, slightly more than Detroit. --Six books we've never heard of are winning awards from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. --The Gates Foundation invests heavily in companies that undermine it's philanthropy says the Seattle Los Angeles Times. --Timothy Burgess wants onto the Seattle City Council and the only thing Seattlest knows about him is that Sound Politics seems to be in favor of him. --Lake City experiences......

In Bellevue, no less than in Belltown, you are where you eat. Tasting notes from two opening nights. Basil's Kitchen describes itself as Mediterranean. It's in the atrium of the newly renovated Bellevue Hilton, formerly the Doubletree. "Casual yet sophisticated ... with a menu to suit all tastes." The Belllevue Hilton's management company, Dow Hotels, are so thrilled with the concept that they're looking into franchising Basil's Kitchens beyond the six they've already opened in......

--Defective Yeti is live-blogging as he reads Moby Dick. And on the other end of the intellectual spectrum, Seattlest Seth is live-blogging as he watches every episode of The Rockford Files. --"I have no beef with gays, upscale condos, hotels and the free market," but all together somehow it pisses Sound Politics off. --"Is that crack smoke coming out of your mouth?" - KOMO springs a public toilet trap on a couple of guys in......

Last time we reported on a Starbucks lawsuit, public sympathy was tilted in the caffeine giant's favor. Even the frequently anticorporate commenters at Consumerist thought it was stupid to sue them for "betrayal" over a botched email coupon. But they're rooting for a Bellevue woman who sued Starbucks on Monday for "unlawful use and abuse of its monopoly power." And no, that's not putting three hotels on Boardwalk. Penny Stafford, owner of Belvi Coffee and......

The Port of Seattle has made the pages of both local dailies the last few days. Knowing the Port, they're feting the PR department. Only it isn't good news: in the Seattle Times, the headline is Port fine with 30 percent drop in earnings, while the P-I's reads Port hires auditor at twice the price of state office. The Port's history of independence from reality (and oversight) regularly results in backslapping based on exceeding......

-The UW Daily went to Tubs and concluded, "Given the convenience of Tubs and the legitimacy of the establishment, I decided students should be more willing to try out the hot tub rooms." -You know, 45th actually does suck. Seattlest can't even cross it on foot without stumbling on the wavy pavement so we understand why it's made the mayor's "Dirty Dozen." -Themed car decorations rule and "Primates of the World" from Ballard is......

Other countries have them, official "Route des Vins" complete with signposts. Why not here? Indeed. Imagine a road actually called the Washington Wine Highway linking the state's major wine-growing regions, with signs to tell you what wine was all about: it would begin in Puget Sound, meander a bit in Woodinville, cross Snoqualmie Pass and take in the entire Yakima Valley. Or it could cross Stampede Pass and noodle around Lake Chelan, follow the......

Taittinger Champagne toasts this week in the Spanish Ballroom of the Fairmont Olympic. The French ambassador, His Excellency Jean-David Levitte, was in town to attend the 20th anniversary gala of the French-American Chamber of Commerce and used the occasion to describe the state of French American relations after two centuries: Lafayette, Pershing, Normandy, Iraq. Back on track after a few troubled moments, he told the 200 guests. In short: "Over 220 years of marriage counseling."......

We have mixed feelings on Rudy's Barbershop. On the one hand, Seattlest gets our hair cut there. On the other hand, we hate it. What can we say - We are large... We learned today that Rudy's is about to begin opening shops in LA, but when you roll into Jonathan's town you can't come in with a name like "Rudy's." No. You gotta go bigger. Fabulous-er! Rudy's in LA will be known as "Rudolph's."......

The city's reporting manpower has been devoted to the Capitol Hill shootings for the past 48 hours as they should be, but were we not experiencing a story of that magnitude you'd be hearing a lot about the man who's been robbing area hotels recently. Apparently they caught a guy in Bellevue who they think is the man who perpetrated a string of some fifteen robberies including at least one in Seattle last week. An......

Ron Sims graces the editorial pages of the Seattle Times today to dangle the carrot of a "re-imagined Seattle Center" in front of us. The Center sucks, he says, and it does. We can do better, he says, and we can. Some things like the Needle and the fountain should stay, but the Center House and the Fun Forest are crap he tells us in colorful metaphor: "Too much of Seattle Center remains like a......

This website about Modernism in Seattle bubbled up via Del.icio.us and after checking it out it struck us that the website is a lot like Modernism itself: Nice skeleton, but where's the meat? It's TheModernList.com covering Seattle and Manhattan and they describe the site thusly: This is a modernist guide to Seattle. It is intended for the design concious interested in experiencing modern architecture, design, art, food and culture. The guide is data focused......

Under the Table: The Seattle Times is calling out the SPD and a few local businesses for routing around 911. The Edgewater was one of Seattlest's favorite hotels even before it was mentioned in relation to this story. Bear-ly Legal: The headline reads, "Love affair with a bear runs afoul of the law," but thanks to a certain farm in Enumclaw we know they're not talking about that kind of love affair. Because that's perfectly......

Seattlest may have our kinks, but we've never delved into the magical world of furries. Oh sure, we watched the MTV: True Life on the topic, and yes, yes, there's that one CSI episode where the paraphilia comes into play, but besides that, we don't know much about people who dress up in animal costumes. Now's our chance to find out all about it, as this weekend is Conifur Northwest, the surprisingly witty name for......

It was just a single line in the weekly newsletter from the Northwest Film Forum, but it set Seattlest's heart a-flutter: PS – Also on Saturday, June 11, at 5:30pm, San Francisco's nationally-renowned (and surprisingly raunchy) double-dutch jumproping team Double Dutchess will make their Seattle debut in our space. We had to know more. In doing a little research on the internets, we discovered that this entity is, in fact, a troupe of four San......